Is your Hotel website ready for the next Google-mobile update

If you’ve been living under a rock lately then chances are you may have missed Google’s big announcement regarding their mobile search results. Although labelled as a huge update and big news, it really should come as no surprise to digital marketers. Google has constantly informed webmasters about the importance of having a mobile friendly website, so those who didn’t take action on this only have themselves to blame.

Even by analysing web traffic in Google Analytics it would have been obvious to many sites that mobile and tablet traffic has grown hugely over the past 2 years, and continues to do so. If you didn’t check how your site functions on non desktop/laptop devices then you really could have held your online presence back.

What do I need to check

In simple terms you need to check how your website loads and functions on a mobile / tablet device. If it works well then great, but if it’s not usable then you’ll be in a rush to get it resolved. As discussed before, our favoured method of resolving this issue is to make use of a fully responsive web design. This just means that your website responds to whichever device is used to view it, with the site resizing to fit the screen.

Making the switch from a non-responsive site to a responsive one can be a huge task for a seasoned web developer, so ensure you’ve planned for this change in good time.
The best way to check if your hotel website will be unaffected by Google’s search update is by viewing your site using Google Chrome, then right clicking on the page and selecting Developer, then Device. You can choose a variety of devices, and it will emulate them so you can see exactly how they behave on each device. This is a great alternative if you don’t own a tablet or smartphone. Alternatively you can use Google’s own Mobile-Friendly Test page where you just have to enter in your hotel site URL then press Analyze.

Help – my site doesn’t function correctly on mobile

If your site doesn’t operate as desired on mobile / tablet then you’re in trouble. This means that on April 21st Google will likely penalise your site in its mobile search results, unless you fix it before their deadline. You can fix it by creating a mobile-web app, by creating mobile-versions of all pages of your site, or by implementing a fully responsive web design.

The Hotel Marketer is happy to help those hotels that are still having issues, and if this is the case for you then just get in touch with us. We have exclusive access to a database of high quality, 100% responsive websites that are perfect for hotels to use.